How to draw chimpanzee fur

When we start drawing animals with coloured pencil, one of the first questions that we ask is, 'how do l draw fur?'. Well, the truth is that there are lots of ways to draw fur. I use lots of different methods myself depending on the type of fur and the color of fur. I thought it might be nice to do a series of step by step articles showing you how l have done things. These ways are not set in stone, other artists often do things very differently with amazing results. I am just showing you how l worked particular parts of certain pieces. A few things with fur stay the same whatever type of fur you want to draw. Always draw your strokes in the direction of the fur. This is essential to achieving realistic fur. Here you need to observe your reference photo closely. Fur does not always go in the same direction on an animal, particularly if it is curly, messy or over an area of the body or face that has a lot of shape. For example, fur swirls in a circle at the side of a cats nose. Always draw individual strokes starting from hair root to the end. If you start from the hair root your stroke naturally tapers to a point where the hair naturally ends. If you start from hair end and work up to the root you will be more likely to get hair with blunt ends. You can see clearly in the first photo below the bluntness of the pencil stroke at the root end compared to the tapering of the hair end.Always work strokes the same length as the fur you are drawing. You will completely change the look of the fur if the strokes you use are too long or too short.l almost always start with the underneath layers of fur, there are times l make exceptions (often to do with colour) and nearly always work light to dark as it is difficult to go truly light over already worked dark fur.Also remember that as is often the case with coloured pencil your work will probably look messy or scribbly for a few layers. Don't be put off by that. Just keep layering until it looks good.So, in the first shot here you can see exactly that. It looks like scribble. It is not scribble. This is actually the most important layer. In this layer l have taken my lightest colour, a pale violet grey, and mapped out the direction of the fur growth. You can see the fur is quite straight above the ears, it curves a little as it comes down the face and curves more significantly under the ear. I cannot stress enough, pay really close attention to your reference photo.

In the second shot below, l have actually worked two more layers (sorry l seem to have missed a shot). I worked over with a darker violet grey and then a soft brown. So you are seeing three layers of color. All the strands individually drawn. All going in the direction of the fur growth. You can see that whilst it still looks messy it is beginning to look more fur like. And because l am drawing each individual hair, in the right direction, the shapes and patterns the strokes are making are the same shapes and patterns that real fur makes.

l apologise for the poor quality of the image below. The sun must have gone in as l took the shot. But you can still see how adding the fourth colour, a dark grey, starts to give the effect of real fur. There is quite a difference between this shot and the one above.

Still working exactly the same way l add black.

And now a dark brown.

And in the last shot, black again. At this point the fur is nearly finished.

I will now blend the fur out with odourless mineral spirits and add a few more light layers of individual hairs and finish by adding in a few light hairs. At this stage l may also add areas of shadow too. To see the finished piece take a look at my original artwork page.